As their contest for the White House draws closer, watch how, regardless of the inevitable personal smears, Obama and McCain draw nearer to each other ... “We lead the world in battling immediate evils and promoting the ultimate good,” said Obama. “We must lead by building a 21st-century military... to advance the security of all people ... Both candidates have paid ritual obeisance to the regime in Tel Aviv, unquestioning support for which defines all presidential ambition ... Like all the candidates, Obama has furthered Israeli/Bush fictions about Iran, whose regime, he says absurdly, “is a threat to all of us”.
On the war in Iraq, Obama the dove and McCain the hawk are almost united ... Obama has now “reserved the right” to change his pledge to get troops out next year. “I will listen to our commanders on the ground,” he now says, echoing Bush. His adviser on Iraq, Colin Kahl, says the US should maintain up to 80,000 troops in Iraq until 2010 ... Like McCain, he would extend the crippling embargo on Cuba.
The American media love both Obama and McCain. Reminiscent of mating calls by Guardian writers to Blair more than a decade ago ...
Pilger has seen this phenomenon of a "media affair" with a candidate for a nation's highest office before -- both in Great Britain 10 years ago, and 40 years ago in the United States, when he was covering Bobby Kennedy's campaign.
The objects of these uncontrollable passions are as one in their support for America’s true deity, its corporate oligarchs ... “Washington lobbyists haven’t funded my campaign,” said Obama in January, “they won’t run my White House and they will not drown out the voices of working Americans when I am president.” According to files held by the Centre for Responsive Politics, the top five contributors to the Obama campaign are registered corporate lobbyists.
Since that piece was written, Obama has of course dropped his opposition to telecom retroactive immunity under the proposed new FISA statutes.
In a more recent piece Pilger offers a sobering reflection on the likely arc of an Obama Presidency.
The foregone nomination of Barack Obama, which, according to one breathless commentator, "marks a truly exciting and historic moment in US history", is a product of the new delusion. Actually, it just seems new. Truly exciting and historic moments have been fabricated around US presidential campaigns for as long as I can recall, generating what can only be described as bullshit on a grand scale ... all subsumed by marketing and “image-making”, now magnified by "virtual" technology ... only those who both control and obey the system can win.
...
Like all serious presidential candidates, past and present, Obama is a hawk and an expansionist. He comes from an unbroken Democratic tradition, as the war-making of presidents Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter and Clinton demonstrates. Obama’s difference may be that he feels an even greater need to show how tough he is.
The U.S. wars in my lifetime were all ended by republican presidents: Eisenhower ended the Korean War (which Truman started, and called a police action, in order to avoid the necessity of congress to declare war); Ford ended the Vietnam War (the origins of which can be traced back to 1945 when the first official protest of U.S. military presence in Vietnam was produced by U.S. merchant marines who were offended that their ships were being used to transport Japanese officers to Vietnam to help the French military reestablish control rather than using the ships to transport American troops back to the states; in 1946 the first American soldier was killed in Vietnam, and in 1951 or 52 the first American prisoners of war were taken in Vietnam; by 1954 the U.S. was funding 80% of the French military effort to fight the Vietnamese communists). Ronald Reagan ended the War on Grenada. George H.W. Bush ended the war on Panama and the first Gulf War.
Truman started and escalated the Korean war. Kennedy and Johnson escalated the Vietnam war. The myths surrounding the "Camelot Court" of Kennedy together with his assassination have precluded him from bearing an adequate blame for the escalating the Vietnam war, but when Kennedy came into office, he ignored Ike's warning that the hot spot in South East Asia would be Cambodia, and advised the outgoing President that instead, it was Vietnam that his administration saw as the threat.
Should Obama be elected President, he will inherit the occupation of Iraq. We can only pray that he will not inherit a war on Iran (which makes NO sense for national security). What will he do in Iraq? The mere fact that Exxon Mobile, Shell, Total and BP, as well as Chevron have got their no-bid contracts to start procuring Iraq's oil suggests these companies have enough confidence in the "stability" of the region to recommence drilling there suggests STRONGLY that they have assurances of a significant U.S. military presence for a LONG time -- whether McCain or Obama wins the election.
Let us pray.
